News and Views of a Technical Nomad

Apr

27

Scott Guthrie’s Blog continues to be very readable with an in-depth look at the new Query Language (aka LINQ) in Orcas.

Read all about it here. 

However, personally I think LINQ would be a lot easier to pick up if it has the “select” statement at the start of the query clause rather than the end; I can only assume that this is quite deliberate and is to stop developers getting confused between LINQ and SQL.

Source: ScottGu’s Blog

Apr

27

New research from Forrester Research still ranks Siebel CRM first in the Salesforce Automation (SFA) marketplace, but notes that hosted CRM applications such as Salesforce.com and Siebel CRM On Demand now occupy five of the top ten places.

It’s nice to see that Siebel is still top seeing as I work in the Siebel marketplace!

SAP’s MyCRM comes in second and Salesforce.com is ranked third.

For full results, please see the full article here.

Source: LinuxWorld.

Apr

27

Windows IT Pro have an article on recent rumours about the possible release of the next version of SQL Server (codename Katmai) in 2008.

You can find it here.

Source: Windows IT Pro

Apr

27

MySQL (which powers this website) got a massive vote of confidence recently from IBM with news that MySQL will be supported on the System i architecture of mid-range machines (aka AS/400) which will give AS/400 users the chance to use DB2/400 as a database engine for MySQL.

MySQL already offers users the choice of different database engines “under the hood” such as InnoDB, SolidDB etc; now DB2/400 will be given the same status on AS/400.

This follows on from a deal between IBM and Zend last year to bring PHP to the AS/400.

For more information, please check it out here.

Source: IT Jungle

Apr

23

ViaArena have pretty amazing pictures of the new Pico-ITX board from VIA. The new board is 10 cm x 7.2 cm in size which is half the size of the Nano-ITX board launched in 2003 which was 12 cm x 12 cm which was itself half the size of the Mini-ITX which (of course) is 17 cm x 17 cm which was first launched in 2001.

Read more about it here.

Of course, we are not going to see this in the shops for a while!

Source: ViaArena

Apr

22

Epiacenter have pictures of some of the latest VIA Mini-ITX and Nano-ITX motherboards which were on display at the recent Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose in California. The pictures can be seen here.

Is it me or are more and more manufacturers jumping on the Mini-ITX bandwagon? When I first discovered the Mini-ITX board, VIA were the main company involved and they specialised (obviously) in the VIA chipsets and CPUs while Commell handled the Pentium M and Pentium 4 architecture.

Now, it seems that new Mini-ITX boards are being announced everyday and many of them are every bit as powerful and standard ATX boards.

Source: EPIACenter

Apr

22

One of the things that attracts me to the Mini-ITX architecture is the sheer size (or lack of more accurately) of the Mini-ITX motherboards.

In the past, I have assembled several ATX size PCs both in a Tower and Mini-Tower sizes and I have to say that the whole ATX board thing does not really interest me any more. Every Mini Tower looks like every other Mini-Tower, they are all noisy, consume a lot of power, take up a lot of space, generate a lot of heat and are hard to lug around. Nowadays, with hard disks getting to be so big and so cheap and with the proliferation of USB and Ethernet external hard disks from companies like LaCie; you don’t even need to have more than one or two disks inside a PC. In fact, you can have a single small disk for the operating system and virtual memory and store everything else on an external drive.

That said, building a standard PC is pretty easy; you don’t have to worry about space constraints and everything fits together OK in terms of installation and system compatibility.

The Mini-ITX architecture is completely different, you do have to worry about space as not all motherboards can fit in all the cases and the cases themselves are so small that you have to sure about the components’ dimensions as otherwise they might not fit.

I have not yet started to build Mini-ITX systems, but I hope to soon. One of the confusing things is that different motherboards are designed for different solutions so choosing the correct board is vital.

In time, I would like to replace all my current standard PCs with Mini-ITX replacements.

Why?

Well, one factor is that Mini-ITX draw less power and take up less space so I can have more PCs using the space space and consuming the same power than I can with standard PCs.

Secondly, the ATX PC is now very powerful and most of my applications that I need a PC for do not require that level of processing power since I do not buy the latest PC games (I am still quite happy with Doom and Elite thanks very much!).

Having additional small-size PCs allows me to experiment with new operating systems, applications etc.

What I like about the Mini-ITX is not just the size etc but the fact that they are highly integrated one-stop shop solutions where you don’t need to buy a separate CPU (in the case of VIA anyway), graphics card, network card etc. The only peripherals you need to worry about are the hard-drive, the memory and the DVD.

I am also keen on building systems which use CF cards instead of hard-drives internally to store the OS files getting access to external hard-drives for their applications. Of course, there are problems with virtual memory files on CF disks in Windows, but if you can store virtual memory on a Microdrive or something then you don’t need a big hard disk internally.

I also like the idea of cutting Windows down to the bare minimum to achieve the purpose of the PC. Needless to say I am very interested in Embedded Windows XP and I would love to see an Embedded Windows Server version as it would be pretty interesting to customise Windows Server.

I am also interested in building systems to use Windows CE instead of XP; if that OS can run the software I need.

To conclude, Mini-ITX and Nano-ITX motherboards give the system builder so much more flexibility; and making use of that is the real challenge.

Apr

17

As many .NET developers are aware, the .NET Framework has had the ability to embed documentation attributes inside C# (.NET Framework 1.0) and VB.NET (.NET Framework 2.0) which can be used to generate an XML documentation file at compile time. This allows developers to document their work as they go along.

Microsoft has built on this foundation with a new tool now available (as a CTP) called Sandcastle which will use the Reflection Library to create MSDN style documentation. 

The product can be downloaded from here

Source: SDA Asia

Apr

13

Ars Technica have an article on recent news that Microsoft will cease development of Visual Foxpro as they have announced that there will not be Visual Foxpro 10, but that VFP 9.0 SP1 would be the final release. A new system, codenamed Sedna, would become the main focus of the Foxpro Team. Sedna is slated to add some useful stuff to VFP 9.0 such as integration with SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005.

Ars Technica speculates on the possibility that Microsoft might make VFP available to the Open Source community as Microsoft have made some suggestions that such a step is being considered.

Visual Foxpro is still, despite its age, a very popular product and a very large number of small and medium sized businesses use it; so I am sure that that the product will be around for quite some time yet.

Source: Ars Technica

Apr

12

Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine have a really good article on LINQ which is Microsoft’s new query technology that is part of the up-coming .NET Framework 3.0 (aka Orcas). LINQ is apparently the creation of one Anders Heilsberg, who is pretty well known in the Development world to say the least, as he was the guy behind Borland Delphi, J++ and C#!

As someone who has been working with Databases for the last 20 years, I find this sort of stuff pretty fascinating.

Read the whole thing here.

Source: Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine

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